Monthly Archives: July 2014

Journal 9 came right before the semester-one final, so I gave students a list of skills they’d been reviewing beside a continuum of fear adjectives and asked them to give vent to their states of mind. The value of the assignment lay in the combination of skill labeling, self-assessment, and end-of-semester therapy. There’s something to be said for letting students feel heard on a personal level in a math class.

Like several other journals I assigned this year, this one started as a fuzzy idea in my mind, then grew to have structure and support after I consulted with my assigned speech-language pathologist. Using the three sentence starters near the top, (N leaves me … because I …; One way I deal with this is …; I would rather N than…) the students first tried filling in blanks aloud in a class discussion. They seemed to enjoy that. Then I moved them to fleshing out their ideas in writing. I don’t think a single student wrote about the same topics they brought up in our discussion, which was interesting. Maybe they figured they’d already gotten those ones of their chests by the time they were writing.

*8/6/14. I listed all the skills as gerunds (solving…, remembering..., etc.), which fit perfectly into the “N leaves me …” sentence starter, but not into the “I would rather N than…” starter. The majority of my students failed to correct the grammar in the second case by changing solvingto solve, and so on. In the future, especially when working with students with language learning disabilities, I’ll want to draw the class’ attention to the necessary change.

Instead of a journal, I assigned this Desmos art project to get kids working and experimenting with graphs. Next time I think I’ll make this first graphing project less free-form, asking them to make a specific image (a face?) or recreate a given pattern.

I improved the assignment sheet for a similar project given later in the year, but this is what I had managed to put together in time for Project 8.